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South Korea's booming 'webtoons'

183 points by oska 8y ago

rb808 8y ago
Can someone please link to a webtoon so I can figure out wtf they're talking about? I feel old.
- intertextuality 8y ago
  I mean, "webtoons" aren't really a thing in western culture. You can think of the posts like chapters from a comic. Anyway, here's the latest chapter[0] of 마음의 소리 (The Sound of Your Heart) which is popular. Enough to have its own tv show on netflix. You can see more of them at comic.naver.com [1] [0]: https://comic.naver.com/webtoon/detail.nhn?titleId=20853&no=1173&weekday=tue https://comic.naver.com/webtoon/detail.nhn?titleId=20853&no=... [1]: https://comic.naver.com/index.nhn https://comic.naver.com/index.nhn
  - philshem 7y ago
    I really enjoyed the first season of The Sound of Your Heart.
- darkmarmot 8y ago
  I read 'Tower of God', it's basically a Shonen like Naruto. (google as I can't link it here- though naver has a public open version somewhere)
  - doikor 8y ago
    Tower of god is available on webtoons.com which is the western site of naver (as in they own it and most of their popular stuff ends up there). It also has a quite good app as others have pointed out. The site also has stuff made by western artist these days.
- yongjik 8y ago
  If you like really, really dark SF, I would recommend Denma, but for some inexplicable reason they seem to have rearranged the panels in some dummy's-mobile-friendly format. What a sacrilege. https://www.webtoons.com/en/sf/denma/1-a-dog-of-panama-1/viewer?title_no=921&episode_no=1 https://www.webtoons.com/en/sf/denma/1-a-dog-of-panama-1/vie... The original format actually looks like this: https://comic.naver.com/webtoon/detail.nhn?titleId=119874&no=1&weekday=tue https://comic.naver.com/webtoon/detail.nhn?titleId=119874&no... Disclaimer: the author is infamous for never being on time, and it's not complete yet.
  - ywain 7y ago
    Holy cow. I've been reading Denma on webtoons.com for over a year now, I had no idea they changed the format. The original looks so much better.
cjsawyer 8y ago
“Internet threatens print industry” would’ve been a less interesting headline.
novok 8y ago
The ideas in Reinventing Comics are finally becoming mainstream.
nyxxie 8y ago
Another day another story of an old style of business facing obsolescence due to shifting market conditions. The narrative for stories like this one is usually “businesses stuck in their ways refuse to adapt and die out”, painting the business as fools who die due to their incompetence and conservative mindset. I’m curious, though; is there any reason why Japan’s manga publishers might want to retain their focus on print media rather than move to a digital focus? Going digital seems like the clear optimal move here, they might even consider encouraging artists to create their own webtoons and make Japan competitive in that space. Why might they not want to do so?
- hkmurakami 8y ago
  Web manga exists already as both redistribution and early talent development. What they are really lacking in is an eye towards global distribution. One reason for fixating on print is the existing strong relationships the publishers have with both the physical book stores and the printing houses in Tokyo. Culturally hard to blow up those decades old relationships. It’s how it is.
- jniedrauer 8y ago
  > an old style of business facing obsolescence Manga is nowhere near obsolete. It's such a huge market that there are entire supporting industries indirectly built around it. > Why might they not want to do so? Probably because they're raking in money.
  - nyxxie 8y ago
    > Manga is nowhere near obsolete I agree. The obsolete label applies to print manga, not the medium itself.
- oska 8y ago
  The question of why Japanese publishers are reluctant to move to the simpler format is addressed towards the end of the article and some good points are made.
hkmurakami 8y ago
At the end of the day great content wins though. The medium’s convenience really only makes a difference in the “filler” level content we consume. For the winners of the power law in manga we’ll go wherever the great content happens to be. (That being said japan is so bad at modern global digital licensing / distribution they really have been leaving tons of money on the table for the last decade+)
- daxterspeed 8y ago
  It's honestly quite depressing to imagine just how much money is left on the table regarding manga. The demand for translations has lead to massive amounts of illegal sharing of digital/digitalized copies and there's even somewhat of a living to be made of unofficial translations (though I know many translate out of self interest). I'm hoping that there'll eventually be a Steam for manga. I know several companies are trying to become that, but they've all failed to catch on with both consumers and producers.
  - Retric 8y ago
    US pricing is silly. But, the US market for this stiff is also fairly tiny. Outside of a small number of mega hits it’s just not worth the company’s time to try and sell to the US market. Some of this just comes down to cultural differences. Most US novels don’t get translated to Japanese.
    - hakfoo 8y ago
      I think part of the weirdness of the market is that they, unconsciously, are straddling the "content" and "souvenir/collectible" market. It's sort of like vinyl records today in that regard. I'm a moderate enthusiast-- probably have like 200 volumes of English translations. I am not really interested in digital platforms, both because then you get no physical souvenir, and because I don't trust them to not implode suddenly. I suspect most long-term fans have a series or two they loved but had to give up on because the translator went bust or it disappeared from whatever service they subscribed to. Once bitten, twice shy...
  - 8y ago
Animats 8y ago
Japan and South Korea are in a battle over popular culture. Japan has the Cool Japan Fund to invest in pop culture projects.[1] The fund, backed by the Government of Japan and some big banks, was well-financed, but the projects have not been very successful.[2] They need some better VCs. [1] https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/ https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/ [2] https://www.nippon.com/en/news/fnn20180713001/floundering-cool-japan-projects-see-loss-after-loss.html https://www.nippon.com/en/news/fnn20180713001/floundering-co...
- 0_gravitas 8y ago
  I mean it seems hard to be very pop-culture when your country is pretty well known for the whole "go with the norms/traditions" stuff,
- echelon 8y ago
  Who will win this battle? What are the ramifications?
  - intertextuality 8y ago
    There's no battle. Both Korea and Japan see the value in exporting cultural products, although I don't think the Korean government is focusing on webtoons as much as kpop. Manga and webtoons are different and cater to different audiences. In any case manga is much, much more popular and actually gets translations. I think this is due to the longer publishing schedules and how established manga is compared to webtoons.
  - cirno9 7y ago
    Korean music is more popular in foreign countries than Japanese music, and their dramas may also be more popular, but manga, anime, light novels and Japanese games are so huge that there's no real competition going on here. I think many people overestimate the importance and popularity of Kpop.
seibelj 8y ago
Anecdotal, but my wife is obsessed with webtoons and eagerly awaits new updates to the (50? 100?) different stories she’s following. It’s similar to the way I consume podcasts. She especially likes romance webtoons. Before finding webtoons she had no interest in graphic novels, comics, anime, etc. and still doesn’t. She just likes her webtoons.
- KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
  It's all about content and demographic targeting. Female targeted comics basically do not exist in the west. Shoujo manga is not popularized / suppressed by the western community. Webtoons have a lot of female creators early on represented that continuously pump out women targeted content. Women could easily be 80% of the core video game playing population if the correct content was made. It's an absolute joke that it's been more 10 years and we still haven't gotten a single twilight video game.
  - Merem 8y ago
    > Shoujo manga is not popularized / suppressed by the western community. Really, do you have some numbers? Here in Germany, Shoujo/Shounen Ai are the most popular genres. I would imagine that those are pretty popular in France as well for example.
    - KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
      I do not have the numbers unfortunately, this is just my impression from being in New York. I know that some of my female friends feel forced to read stuff like One Piece (which is great) to fit in with the "community". I don't know how it is in Europe but I would suspect that it's still male dominated with shoujo/shounen ai being maybe 30% of sales if at that? I'm pretty sure here in the US it's like 15%.
      - Merem 8y ago
        Absolutely not. I unfortunately don't have sales numbers like it's the case in Japan but the Shoujo/Shounen Ai/Yaoi manga consistently rank very well. If you aren't into those, going to a bookstore is basically pointless since they occupy most of the shelf space. As an example, the top 20 Tokyopop manga in the month of March 2019 [1] had 8 Shoujo, 4 Shounen-Ai/Yaoi, 5 Other and 3 non-defined in it with one Yaoi manga selling the most. It wouldn't surprise me if the sales are actually around 65-70% of the total number, and that's with One Piece still being around. [1] https://www.japaniac.de/tokyopops-meistverkaufte-manga-im-maerz-2019/ https://www.japaniac.de/tokyopops-meistverkaufte-manga-im-ma... Here is also the top 15 of 2017 for KAZÉ (the covers say it all): https://www.anime2you.de/news/183746/die-top-15-meistverkauften-kaze-mangas-2017/5/ https://www.anime2you.de/news/183746/die-top-15-meistverkauf...
0x8BADF00D 8y ago
They’re essentially the same thing. I see ads for webtoons but the tropes are the same you see in manga. Very large breasted women who are all attracted to the socially awkward nerdy guy.
- yorwba 8y ago
  That is probably more indicative of the kind of content that pulls in eyeballs when broadly advertised than the genre as a whole. For example https://www.heartofkeol.com/ https://www.heartofkeol.com/ probably counts as a "webtoon" and follows a different set of tropes.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    Also a matter of targeting - with fresh accounts browsing certain subsets where I didn't bother to install have clearly gotten work youtube for music loops to think of me as a woman completely accidentally. I got essentially entirely romance manga banner ads and video ads were for birth control, menstrual products, and oddly schizophrenia medication (not sure if that is broad targetted or not). It makes them look amusingly inept at ad targeting and someone in marketing look kind of sexist - given that guy ads tried to sell me cars and beer constantly.
- cirno9 7y ago
  There's manga about cooking, golf, video games, samurai, World War II, social problems, fantasy, scifi, single parenthood, mountain climbing, volleyball, lesbians, office work... anything you could think of. "Large breasted women attracted to the socially awkward nerdy guy" is just a Western meme.
httpz 8y ago
Webtoons have a very interesting business model. Unlike manga, webtoons are usually free and ad supported. I don't even have to sign up to start reading one in most cases. The interesting part is, webtoons are usually released once a week and you can actually pay ~30cents to read the latest episode before it's released next week for free. So if you can't wait another week after a cliff hanger, you can pay to read the next episode and now you're stuck in a vicious cycle of paying every episode to be one episode ahead.
- kamfc 8y ago
  A value meal for 0.30USD, count me in. The concern is how much of it gets to the artist.
- techwolf 8y ago
  Most webcomic artists have been using this model for a while now; no one likes ads and they don't pay much, but $1 a month on Patreon to see pages a week early isn't too much to ask. There are often higher tiers for bonus content (sketches, high-res pages, side comics, etc.) as well.
kevingadd 8y ago
One other element to webtoons' success that isn't mentioned in this article: When I see people talking about comics with LGBT themes that aren't from the US, a significant % of them are Korean webtoons on one of the multiple portals that have dozens of active series with those themes in them. This seems like a savvy way to target audiences that are traditionally underserved (i.e. if they want to find this content, japanese or otherwise, it's quite difficult). Some of the portals seem to specialize in this content - Approximately 1/2 of Lezhin's active series appear to be about homosexual romance, for example. For a Japanese consumer a lot of this content is either in 1-3 focused monthly/bimonthly print series or picked up at comics festivals in-person. I've seen some attempts to target this audience from Chinese artists as well but with the policy changes made by the Chinese government lately I have no idea if those artists will be able to continue with their work - I've seen a few reports from artists that the government is actively punishing them for releasing that kind of content now (hopefully this is not true).
duckonomy 8y ago
Korean here who has been watching webtoons since the very beginning. Unlike some recent hits made by printed manhwa artists, webtoons were initially an amateur thing. Where as mangas always seemed to have a certain level of professionality in terms of detail and storytelling. That said, it is interesting how Koreans adapt to these technologies really fast and globalize their culture through a media platform. It feels really weird when you spot someone reading a webtoon in public in the US because that was just native Koreans who lived in Korea 5 years ago.
- sdrothrock 8y ago
  Since you've been reading webtoons for a long time, I have a question if you have time. A lot of the most popular webtoons I've read are based on serialized novels (e.g. 귀환자의 마법은 특별해야 합니다) -- I've been wondering if this is an actual link, or just some kind of selection bias. Do you know?
  - duckonomy 8y ago
    I'm not really sure what the "most popular" webtoons among non-Koreans. I know some American friends who showed me some that were supposedly popular, but I couldn't recognize. That's certainly not a trend in mainstream webtoons, which are usually the Naver Webtoons. Nearly all (can't think of any one based on something) of them on that platform are original content. Sometimes they get published as novels. Like Noblesse. I think the particular one you mentioned is based on a webnovel (similar to webtoons but novels). I definitely see this trend in Japanese mangas though.
- esyir 8y ago
  I'd compare the Korean webtoon scene more to the american webcomic scene than to the professional manga environment. Maybe it also compares well to doujin, though to me it feels like the closest resemblance is webcomics.
kmlx 8y ago
it’s great that this forces more manga to move to the web. where’s my Netflix for manga Japan? anecdotally, on a JAL flight between Tokyo and London (for which Russia taxes every passenger individually, story for another time), I saw a bunch of manga on the in-flight entertainment system, and people were actually using it to read. cooler still, seeing both the parents and their children reading different manga.
- intertextuality 8y ago
  If someone did a subscription service for manga with quality translations (and coloring) they'd make a killing, probably.
  - kmlx 8y ago
    the problem is the medium: manga are just not made for digital consumption. they’re brilliant for analog thou. i’ve tried a couple of these services, but they were quite subpar.
    - laurus 8y ago
      I don't see how reading manga on an E-ink ereader, with one page filling the screen and "turning" pages by pressing the right side, is fundamentally different from reading it in "analog" (paper) form. I wouldn't want to read it on a non E-ink screen, or have to scroll within a single page though.
      - intertextuality 7y ago
        Parent probably was referring to reading it on a laptop or similar, which many people do. (I also read it this way). I use the SimpleComic reader on OSX, first removing the menu and then fullscreening it. This requires me to download the manga beforehand. It works for me since I don't read that much manga. Now that I have an ipad I wonder how well it could work.
    - slightwinder 7y ago
jpatokal 8y ago
One factor not discussed in the article is the differing attitude towards exports, piracy and copy protection. Historically, and even today, it's extremely difficult to legally view lots of Japanese content outside Japan, yet Japanese producers pursue copyright claims with rabid fervor. Japanese publishers for books and music were also extremely resistant to move to e-books, digital downloads or streaming. For whatever reason, South Korean publishers were not as myopic, meaning their content could be more easily accessed -- at first technically illegally, but soon there was a groundswell of demand that led to large-scale legal rebroadcasting (TV stations showing Korean dramas etc) and that then led to today's juggernaut. Manga is just the latest example of Japan losing a market that really should have been theirs for the taking.
- noobermin 8y ago
  At the risk of sounding somewhat like I'm stereotyping, why is this? I never associated this with Japan in particular, but between losing out of loads of Japanese music I followed a few years ago and Nintendo basically invalidating everyone's Wii purchases it feels like it is ingrained in the corporate culture over there particularly for the large publishers. Not that we have our own blemishes, DMCA, disregard for things like fair-use, parody and so on, etc. Heh, now that I think of it we have our own issues too.
  - adventured 8y ago
    I'd be very surprised if South Korea doesn't still view itself as an underdog, both economically and culturally. They were very poor until the early 1990s. As recently as the mid 1970s, they were still third world poor. Japan was a mighty empire not so long ago, and then quickly rose again after the 1950s to have one of the most potent economies. In the late 1980s while Japan was viewed as taking over the world economically, South Korea was just beginning to stir (Japan's economic output per capita was about 6x that of South Korea in the late 1980s). All the way back to the early 1960s, Japan had 5x to 6x the output per capita of South Korea. I think a country that perceives itself as an underdog always behaves very different from a country that regards being on top as their natural right (which was certainly Japan's attitude during their economic ascension decades). South Korea will surpass Japan's per capita economic output in the next dozen years, for the first time in over a century. It'll be quite the accomplishment.
philliphaydon 8y ago
Japan still uses tape to go from agency to broadcaster (this has only started to change over the last couple of years) and a lot of it is to do with not wanting to put people out of work and less about adopting technology. The way business works in japan is just so different to anywhere else in the world.
kochikame 8y ago
Japanese people are reading ad-supported free manga on their phones and tablets constantly nowadays. There are several competing services and they seem to be spending a lot on advertising right now if the amount of TV commercials is anything to go by
leggomylibro 8y ago
Web comics were pretty big in the West for a while, too - I guess they never really got large enough to be commercialized and produced on an industrial scale, though. The article mentions that a lot of these webtoons are vertically-oriented for smartphones; is that what sets them apart? Or is it more of a genre thing? Did they maybe crank up the production values a bit? https://xkcd.com/157/ https://xkcd.com/157/
- intertextuality 8y ago
  It may be a little bit of A, a little bit of B. Anecdotally I can tell you I've seen many, many people reading webtoons on their phones on the subway. I've done it. The vertical format in this case is perfect.
- thedaemon 7y ago
  Definitely the vertical oriented for smart phones. You cannot view them in a page layout. Makes me kind of sad because I don't look at content on my small smartphone, instead I use a large LCD monitor or a large tablet. These webtoons are annoying to try to read on them. :( Makes me sad that I won't be able to read any because of the annoying interface.
olingern 8y ago
I live Japan and this is a great example of how the culture holds on to tradition even if it hurts them over time. Manga is interesting because it’s actually a quite old art form, but the current print method of publication is not [1]. So, you’d expect the web to be a natural, obvious progression. I’d liken the ethos here to: “Move slow and never break things.” 1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga
yongjik 8y ago
> Most webtoons trending on domestic manga apps are not only translated but meticulously localized for a Japanese audience, with names, locations and various proper nouns all Japanized. Even the original illustrations can be altered to erase anything distinctly South Korean, such as the design of the police cars. Man, how the table has turned. This was exactly how South Korea imported Japanese manga and anime for decades. Up until mid-90s virtually all Japanese manga was "Koreanized" in a similar way, even though by that time everybody knew they were Japanese. In earlier days they wouldn't even tell us: there are a generation or two of Korean boys who grew up thinking Atom, Mazinga and Future Boy Conan were Korean animations. The wounds of colonization (1910-1945) were still raw, and admitting you liked Japanese culture was frowned upon for a very long time. (Which is ironic, considering most of children's prime time TV shows were made in Japan.) South Korea briefly had a renaissance of comics ("manhwa") in the 90s, but then widespread piracy together with the advent of the internet killed off the industry in the early 2000s. I remember a comic strip where the protagonist (the artist himself) decides to kill himself after going broke, so he turns on the gas valve and go to sleep. He wakes up the next day because the gas line was shut off for non-payment. I think a major reason why Korea embraced webtoon so easily is that the traditional comics industry was essentially burned to ground. Webtoons were initially a side dish, offered by web portals (which are still strong in Korea) to lure viewers because servers were cheap and artists were also cheap (where else would they go, anyway?). (It also explains why it's basically free and ad-supported.) But then it started to make money, and then money started to attract talents, and so on. If someone told me, only five years ago, that Korean webtoons will threaten Japanese manga industry, I would've laughed. "What are you talking about? It's Japan!"
m3kw9 8y ago
On notice like scoring a point when you are down 10-0
FrozenVoid 8y ago
There are some programs that colorize manga(e.g. neural networks), if it was more popular it would add a competitive advantage vs webtoons - artists can tune automatic colorization themselves(vs drawing color). Reading monochrome black drawings is very confined expirience, such colors are depressive, dramatic and bleak - colors that evoke negative associations and melancholy. Color expands the emotional gamut significantly.
Noos 7y ago
Eh, they'll die off. Tokypop used to try and license Korean manhwa here a while back ago, among other publishers. If you remember the movie the Priest, that was about as famous as it got here. I used to read it, usually it was the same problem a lot of Korean stuff has..it's an okay copy, but there isn't really an original spark to it that makes it come alive like manga does.
sercand 7y ago
I have paid to webtoons for fast-pass several times but not for manga from Japan. One of the reason is official translations come later than the fan translated versions. After a couple of days, there is no remaining discussion of the chapter at the community. Also, the community is ready to pay for the new manga chapters. Last month, a fan translation group removed their translation of a webtoon, which was in the fast-pass period, because of backlash by the community. I wish manga is more accessible. Because they are professionally crafted and have better storytelling.
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
Interesting to see the picture on the top of the article, meant to represent Japanese print manga, features Shingeki no Kyojin (Attack on Titan) most prominently. I don't think I've read any True Beauty, but then again, the fact that I'm not at all sure whether I have, whereas there is no chance of a snowball in hell that I'd confuse Shingeki No Kyojin for anything else, suggests to me that Japanese print manga still have a future. To say the least. And can I take this opportunity to point people to Totsukuni no Shoujo (The Girl from the Other Side)? https://myanimelist.net/manga/93972/Totsukuni_no_Shoujo https://myanimelist.net/manga/93972/Totsukuni_no_Shoujo Once in a while, I find a little gem like that buried under all the shonen and shoujo in my local bookstore. That's what keeps me coming back for more.
Quarrelsome 7y ago
worth noting One Punch Man started out in a web toonish delivery mechanism before being turned into manga.
ksec 7y ago
Warning: May be inappropriate comments ahead. I stumbled upon the topic many years ago when I was looking at online publishing and making money. And Webtoons in South Korea caught my eyes, It was in its early days but I first thought it was some idea that will be destined to fail. Simply because I don't believe there is a market that are willing to pay for it, the content were; Amateur at best. And it was too easy to private. I was wrong. I knew I was wrong because it is gaining momentum not only in Japan, but also across in SEA. There are two distinct category that Web Toons, and specially South Korea Webtoons excel in. LGBT and Adult Content. In LGBT I have no idea the audience were huge, with distribution channel like the web, even a small percentage would be a massive Number. And it was amazing to see lots of female secretly fantasise about Gay Man. And unlike man where many are privating porn, they are very much willing to pay for it. Then there is Hentai, ( the world actually means something else in Japanese but its English form is mostly used to describe Porn in Cartoons or 2D ). I mean, who enjoys it? And even if they did, who is wiling to paid for it? Again turns out the audience is actually gigantic. Pornhub even confirmed this when they release their data analysis. One day I chatted with an old friends, he is a real life translator who used to do subtitle for Anime as hobby and ask him what is he up to. Turns out he was doing these Webtoons translation from Korean and was making good money. Good not in terms of amount, but in terms of time spent vs money made. As it was much easier to do compared to Animation.
- cirno9 7y ago
  Commercial and independent gay and lesbian manga have existed for 40-50 years, and there's also a significant number of gay/lesbian anime and games.
syntaxing 7y ago
I'm a pretty huge reader of manga and I have been reading a couple of webtoons lately. Besides South Korean ones, there are couple of Chinese Webtoons that is based off of famous web novels that is really fun to read. South Korean webtoons tend to have "weird" formatting since its one long page rather like a book since its catered towards phones or tablets. I noticed a good amount of webtoons out of South Korea that is sponsored by Line originally but the industry has really taken off this past couple years with independent publishers. Not sure if this is true since I only see the English translated ones rather than the originals but I find that South Korean webtoons has a higher percentage of being explicit material. Not sure if it's because translators chose them on purpose since they have a higher click rate?

183 points by oska 8y ago

rb808 8y ago

Can someone please link to a webtoon so I can figure out wtf they're talking about? I feel old.

intertextuality 8y ago
I mean, "webtoons" aren't really a thing in western culture. You can think of the posts like chapters from a comic. Anyway, here's the latest chapter[0] of 마음의 소리 (The Sound of Your Heart) which is popular. Enough to have its own tv show on netflix. You can see more of them at comic.naver.com [1] [0]: https://comic.naver.com/webtoon/detail.nhn?titleId=20853&no=1173&weekday=tue https://comic.naver.com/webtoon/detail.nhn?titleId=20853&no=... [1]: https://comic.naver.com/index.nhn https://comic.naver.com/index.nhn
- philshem 7y ago
  I really enjoyed the first season of The Sound of Your Heart.
darkmarmot 8y ago
I read 'Tower of God', it's basically a Shonen like Naruto. (google as I can't link it here- though naver has a public open version somewhere)
- doikor 8y ago
  Tower of god is available on webtoons.com which is the western site of naver (as in they own it and most of their popular stuff ends up there). It also has a quite good app as others have pointed out. The site also has stuff made by western artist these days.
yongjik 8y ago
If you like really, really dark SF, I would recommend Denma, but for some inexplicable reason they seem to have rearranged the panels in some dummy's-mobile-friendly format. What a sacrilege. https://www.webtoons.com/en/sf/denma/1-a-dog-of-panama-1/viewer?title_no=921&episode_no=1 https://www.webtoons.com/en/sf/denma/1-a-dog-of-panama-1/vie... The original format actually looks like this: https://comic.naver.com/webtoon/detail.nhn?titleId=119874&no=1&weekday=tue https://comic.naver.com/webtoon/detail.nhn?titleId=119874&no... Disclaimer: the author is infamous for never being on time, and it's not complete yet.
- ywain 7y ago
  Holy cow. I've been reading Denma on webtoons.com for over a year now, I had no idea they changed the format. The original looks so much better.

cjsawyer 8y ago

“Internet threatens print industry” would’ve been a less interesting headline.

novok 8y ago

The ideas in Reinventing Comics are finally becoming mainstream.

nyxxie 8y ago

Another day another story of an old style of business facing obsolescence due to shifting market conditions. The narrative for stories like this one is usually “businesses stuck in their ways refuse to adapt and die out”, painting the business as fools who die due to their incompetence and conservative mindset. I’m curious, though; is there any reason why Japan’s manga publishers might want to retain their focus on print media rather than move to a digital focus? Going digital seems like the clear optimal move here, they might even consider encouraging artists to create their own webtoons and make Japan competitive in that space. Why might they not want to do so?

hkmurakami 8y ago
Web manga exists already as both redistribution and early talent development. What they are really lacking in is an eye towards global distribution. One reason for fixating on print is the existing strong relationships the publishers have with both the physical book stores and the printing houses in Tokyo. Culturally hard to blow up those decades old relationships. It’s how it is.
jniedrauer 8y ago
> an old style of business facing obsolescence Manga is nowhere near obsolete. It's such a huge market that there are entire supporting industries indirectly built around it. > Why might they not want to do so? Probably because they're raking in money.
- nyxxie 8y ago
  > Manga is nowhere near obsolete I agree. The obsolete label applies to print manga, not the medium itself.
oska 8y ago
The question of why Japanese publishers are reluctant to move to the simpler format is addressed towards the end of the article and some good points are made.

hkmurakami 8y ago

At the end of the day great content wins though. The medium’s convenience really only makes a difference in the “filler” level content we consume. For the winners of the power law in manga we’ll go wherever the great content happens to be. (That being said japan is so bad at modern global digital licensing / distribution they really have been leaving tons of money on the table for the last decade+)

daxterspeed 8y ago
It's honestly quite depressing to imagine just how much money is left on the table regarding manga. The demand for translations has lead to massive amounts of illegal sharing of digital/digitalized copies and there's even somewhat of a living to be made of unofficial translations (though I know many translate out of self interest). I'm hoping that there'll eventually be a Steam for manga. I know several companies are trying to become that, but they've all failed to catch on with both consumers and producers.
- Retric 8y ago
  US pricing is silly. But, the US market for this stiff is also fairly tiny. Outside of a small number of mega hits it’s just not worth the company’s time to try and sell to the US market. Some of this just comes down to cultural differences. Most US novels don’t get translated to Japanese.
  - hakfoo 8y ago
    I think part of the weirdness of the market is that they, unconsciously, are straddling the "content" and "souvenir/collectible" market. It's sort of like vinyl records today in that regard. I'm a moderate enthusiast-- probably have like 200 volumes of English translations. I am not really interested in digital platforms, both because then you get no physical souvenir, and because I don't trust them to not implode suddenly. I suspect most long-term fans have a series or two they loved but had to give up on because the translator went bust or it disappeared from whatever service they subscribed to. Once bitten, twice shy...
- 8y ago

Animats 8y ago

Japan and South Korea are in a battle over popular culture. Japan has the Cool Japan Fund to invest in pop culture projects.[1] The fund, backed by the Government of Japan and some big banks, was well-financed, but the projects have not been very successful.[2] They need some better VCs. [1] https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/ https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/ [2] https://www.nippon.com/en/news/fnn20180713001/floundering-cool-japan-projects-see-loss-after-loss.html https://www.nippon.com/en/news/fnn20180713001/floundering-co...

0_gravitas 8y ago
I mean it seems hard to be very pop-culture when your country is pretty well known for the whole "go with the norms/traditions" stuff,
echelon 8y ago
Who will win this battle? What are the ramifications?
- intertextuality 8y ago
  There's no battle. Both Korea and Japan see the value in exporting cultural products, although I don't think the Korean government is focusing on webtoons as much as kpop. Manga and webtoons are different and cater to different audiences. In any case manga is much, much more popular and actually gets translations. I think this is due to the longer publishing schedules and how established manga is compared to webtoons.
- cirno9 7y ago
  Korean music is more popular in foreign countries than Japanese music, and their dramas may also be more popular, but manga, anime, light novels and Japanese games are so huge that there's no real competition going on here. I think many people overestimate the importance and popularity of Kpop.

seibelj 8y ago

Anecdotal, but my wife is obsessed with webtoons and eagerly awaits new updates to the (50? 100?) different stories she’s following. It’s similar to the way I consume podcasts. She especially likes romance webtoons. Before finding webtoons she had no interest in graphic novels, comics, anime, etc. and still doesn’t. She just likes her webtoons.

KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
It's all about content and demographic targeting. Female targeted comics basically do not exist in the west. Shoujo manga is not popularized / suppressed by the western community. Webtoons have a lot of female creators early on represented that continuously pump out women targeted content. Women could easily be 80% of the core video game playing population if the correct content was made. It's an absolute joke that it's been more 10 years and we still haven't gotten a single twilight video game.
- Merem 8y ago
  > Shoujo manga is not popularized / suppressed by the western community. Really, do you have some numbers? Here in Germany, Shoujo/Shounen Ai are the most popular genres. I would imagine that those are pretty popular in France as well for example.
  - KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
    I do not have the numbers unfortunately, this is just my impression from being in New York. I know that some of my female friends feel forced to read stuff like One Piece (which is great) to fit in with the "community". I don't know how it is in Europe but I would suspect that it's still male dominated with shoujo/shounen ai being maybe 30% of sales if at that? I'm pretty sure here in the US it's like 15%.
    - Merem 8y ago
      Absolutely not. I unfortunately don't have sales numbers like it's the case in Japan but the Shoujo/Shounen Ai/Yaoi manga consistently rank very well. If you aren't into those, going to a bookstore is basically pointless since they occupy most of the shelf space. As an example, the top 20 Tokyopop manga in the month of March 2019 [1] had 8 Shoujo, 4 Shounen-Ai/Yaoi, 5 Other and 3 non-defined in it with one Yaoi manga selling the most. It wouldn't surprise me if the sales are actually around 65-70% of the total number, and that's with One Piece still being around. [1] https://www.japaniac.de/tokyopops-meistverkaufte-manga-im-maerz-2019/ https://www.japaniac.de/tokyopops-meistverkaufte-manga-im-ma... Here is also the top 15 of 2017 for KAZÉ (the covers say it all): https://www.anime2you.de/news/183746/die-top-15-meistverkauften-kaze-mangas-2017/5/ https://www.anime2you.de/news/183746/die-top-15-meistverkauf...

0x8BADF00D 8y ago

They’re essentially the same thing. I see ads for webtoons but the tropes are the same you see in manga. Very large breasted women who are all attracted to the socially awkward nerdy guy.

yorwba 8y ago
That is probably more indicative of the kind of content that pulls in eyeballs when broadly advertised than the genre as a whole. For example https://www.heartofkeol.com/ https://www.heartofkeol.com/ probably counts as a "webtoon" and follows a different set of tropes.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Also a matter of targeting - with fresh accounts browsing certain subsets where I didn't bother to install have clearly gotten work youtube for music loops to think of me as a woman completely accidentally. I got essentially entirely romance manga banner ads and video ads were for birth control, menstrual products, and oddly schizophrenia medication (not sure if that is broad targetted or not). It makes them look amusingly inept at ad targeting and someone in marketing look kind of sexist - given that guy ads tried to sell me cars and beer constantly.
cirno9 7y ago
There's manga about cooking, golf, video games, samurai, World War II, social problems, fantasy, scifi, single parenthood, mountain climbing, volleyball, lesbians, office work... anything you could think of. "Large breasted women attracted to the socially awkward nerdy guy" is just a Western meme.

httpz 8y ago

Webtoons have a very interesting business model. Unlike manga, webtoons are usually free and ad supported. I don't even have to sign up to start reading one in most cases. The interesting part is, webtoons are usually released once a week and you can actually pay ~30cents to read the latest episode before it's released next week for free. So if you can't wait another week after a cliff hanger, you can pay to read the next episode and now you're stuck in a vicious cycle of paying every episode to be one episode ahead.

kamfc 8y ago
A value meal for 0.30USD, count me in. The concern is how much of it gets to the artist.
techwolf 8y ago
Most webcomic artists have been using this model for a while now; no one likes ads and they don't pay much, but $1 a month on Patreon to see pages a week early isn't too much to ask. There are often higher tiers for bonus content (sketches, high-res pages, side comics, etc.) as well.

kevingadd 8y ago

One other element to webtoons' success that isn't mentioned in this article: When I see people talking about comics with LGBT themes that aren't from the US, a significant % of them are Korean webtoons on one of the multiple portals that have dozens of active series with those themes in them. This seems like a savvy way to target audiences that are traditionally underserved (i.e. if they want to find this content, japanese or otherwise, it's quite difficult). Some of the portals seem to specialize in this content - Approximately 1/2 of Lezhin's active series appear to be about homosexual romance, for example. For a Japanese consumer a lot of this content is either in 1-3 focused monthly/bimonthly print series or picked up at comics festivals in-person. I've seen some attempts to target this audience from Chinese artists as well but with the policy changes made by the Chinese government lately I have no idea if those artists will be able to continue with their work - I've seen a few reports from artists that the government is actively punishing them for releasing that kind of content now (hopefully this is not true).

duckonomy 8y ago

Korean here who has been watching webtoons since the very beginning. Unlike some recent hits made by printed manhwa artists, webtoons were initially an amateur thing. Where as mangas always seemed to have a certain level of professionality in terms of detail and storytelling. That said, it is interesting how Koreans adapt to these technologies really fast and globalize their culture through a media platform. It feels really weird when you spot someone reading a webtoon in public in the US because that was just native Koreans who lived in Korea 5 years ago.

sdrothrock 8y ago
Since you've been reading webtoons for a long time, I have a question if you have time. A lot of the most popular webtoons I've read are based on serialized novels (e.g. 귀환자의 마법은 특별해야 합니다) -- I've been wondering if this is an actual link, or just some kind of selection bias. Do you know?
- duckonomy 8y ago
  I'm not really sure what the "most popular" webtoons among non-Koreans. I know some American friends who showed me some that were supposedly popular, but I couldn't recognize. That's certainly not a trend in mainstream webtoons, which are usually the Naver Webtoons. Nearly all (can't think of any one based on something) of them on that platform are original content. Sometimes they get published as novels. Like Noblesse. I think the particular one you mentioned is based on a webnovel (similar to webtoons but novels). I definitely see this trend in Japanese mangas though.
esyir 8y ago
I'd compare the Korean webtoon scene more to the american webcomic scene than to the professional manga environment. Maybe it also compares well to doujin, though to me it feels like the closest resemblance is webcomics.

kmlx 8y ago

it’s great that this forces more manga to move to the web. where’s my Netflix for manga Japan? anecdotally, on a JAL flight between Tokyo and London (for which Russia taxes every passenger individually, story for another time), I saw a bunch of manga on the in-flight entertainment system, and people were actually using it to read. cooler still, seeing both the parents and their children reading different manga.

intertextuality 8y ago
If someone did a subscription service for manga with quality translations (and coloring) they'd make a killing, probably.
- kmlx 8y ago
  the problem is the medium: manga are just not made for digital consumption. they’re brilliant for analog thou. i’ve tried a couple of these services, but they were quite subpar.
  - laurus 8y ago
    I don't see how reading manga on an E-ink ereader, with one page filling the screen and "turning" pages by pressing the right side, is fundamentally different from reading it in "analog" (paper) form. I wouldn't want to read it on a non E-ink screen, or have to scroll within a single page though.
    - intertextuality 7y ago
      Parent probably was referring to reading it on a laptop or similar, which many people do. (I also read it this way). I use the SimpleComic reader on OSX, first removing the menu and then fullscreening it. This requires me to download the manga beforehand. It works for me since I don't read that much manga. Now that I have an ipad I wonder how well it could work.
  - slightwinder 7y ago

jpatokal 8y ago

One factor not discussed in the article is the differing attitude towards exports, piracy and copy protection. Historically, and even today, it's extremely difficult to legally view lots of Japanese content outside Japan, yet Japanese producers pursue copyright claims with rabid fervor. Japanese publishers for books and music were also extremely resistant to move to e-books, digital downloads or streaming. For whatever reason, South Korean publishers were not as myopic, meaning their content could be more easily accessed -- at first technically illegally, but soon there was a groundswell of demand that led to large-scale legal rebroadcasting (TV stations showing Korean dramas etc) and that then led to today's juggernaut. Manga is just the latest example of Japan losing a market that really should have been theirs for the taking.

noobermin 8y ago
At the risk of sounding somewhat like I'm stereotyping, why is this? I never associated this with Japan in particular, but between losing out of loads of Japanese music I followed a few years ago and Nintendo basically invalidating everyone's Wii purchases it feels like it is ingrained in the corporate culture over there particularly for the large publishers. Not that we have our own blemishes, DMCA, disregard for things like fair-use, parody and so on, etc. Heh, now that I think of it we have our own issues too.
- adventured 8y ago
  I'd be very surprised if South Korea doesn't still view itself as an underdog, both economically and culturally. They were very poor until the early 1990s. As recently as the mid 1970s, they were still third world poor. Japan was a mighty empire not so long ago, and then quickly rose again after the 1950s to have one of the most potent economies. In the late 1980s while Japan was viewed as taking over the world economically, South Korea was just beginning to stir (Japan's economic output per capita was about 6x that of South Korea in the late 1980s). All the way back to the early 1960s, Japan had 5x to 6x the output per capita of South Korea. I think a country that perceives itself as an underdog always behaves very different from a country that regards being on top as their natural right (which was certainly Japan's attitude during their economic ascension decades). South Korea will surpass Japan's per capita economic output in the next dozen years, for the first time in over a century. It'll be quite the accomplishment.

philliphaydon 8y ago

Japan still uses tape to go from agency to broadcaster (this has only started to change over the last couple of years) and a lot of it is to do with not wanting to put people out of work and less about adopting technology. The way business works in japan is just so different to anywhere else in the world.

kochikame 8y ago

Japanese people are reading ad-supported free manga on their phones and tablets constantly nowadays. There are several competing services and they seem to be spending a lot on advertising right now if the amount of TV commercials is anything to go by

leggomylibro 8y ago

Web comics were pretty big in the West for a while, too - I guess they never really got large enough to be commercialized and produced on an industrial scale, though. The article mentions that a lot of these webtoons are vertically-oriented for smartphones; is that what sets them apart? Or is it more of a genre thing? Did they maybe crank up the production values a bit? https://xkcd.com/157/ https://xkcd.com/157/

intertextuality 8y ago
It may be a little bit of A, a little bit of B. Anecdotally I can tell you I've seen many, many people reading webtoons on their phones on the subway. I've done it. The vertical format in this case is perfect.
thedaemon 7y ago
Definitely the vertical oriented for smart phones. You cannot view them in a page layout. Makes me kind of sad because I don't look at content on my small smartphone, instead I use a large LCD monitor or a large tablet. These webtoons are annoying to try to read on them. :( Makes me sad that I won't be able to read any because of the annoying interface.

olingern 8y ago

I live Japan and this is a great example of how the culture holds on to tradition even if it hurts them over time. Manga is interesting because it’s actually a quite old art form, but the current print method of publication is not [1]. So, you’d expect the web to be a natural, obvious progression. I’d liken the ethos here to: “Move slow and never break things.” 1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga

yongjik 8y ago

> Most webtoons trending on domestic manga apps are not only translated but meticulously localized for a Japanese audience, with names, locations and various proper nouns all Japanized. Even the original illustrations can be altered to erase anything distinctly South Korean, such as the design of the police cars. Man, how the table has turned. This was exactly how South Korea imported Japanese manga and anime for decades. Up until mid-90s virtually all Japanese manga was "Koreanized" in a similar way, even though by that time everybody knew they were Japanese. In earlier days they wouldn't even tell us: there are a generation or two of Korean boys who grew up thinking Atom, Mazinga and Future Boy Conan were Korean animations. The wounds of colonization (1910-1945) were still raw, and admitting you liked Japanese culture was frowned upon for a very long time. (Which is ironic, considering most of children's prime time TV shows were made in Japan.) South Korea briefly had a renaissance of comics ("manhwa") in the 90s, but then widespread piracy together with the advent of the internet killed off the industry in the early 2000s. I remember a comic strip where the protagonist (the artist himself) decides to kill himself after going broke, so he turns on the gas valve and go to sleep. He wakes up the next day because the gas line was shut off for non-payment. I think a major reason why Korea embraced webtoon so easily is that the traditional comics industry was essentially burned to ground. Webtoons were initially a side dish, offered by web portals (which are still strong in Korea) to lure viewers because servers were cheap and artists were also cheap (where else would they go, anyway?). (It also explains why it's basically free and ad-supported.) But then it started to make money, and then money started to attract talents, and so on. If someone told me, only five years ago, that Korean webtoons will threaten Japanese manga industry, I would've laughed. "What are you talking about? It's Japan!"

m3kw9 8y ago

On notice like scoring a point when you are down 10-0

FrozenVoid 8y ago

There are some programs that colorize manga(e.g. neural networks), if it was more popular it would add a competitive advantage vs webtoons - artists can tune automatic colorization themselves(vs drawing color). Reading monochrome black drawings is very confined expirience, such colors are depressive, dramatic and bleak - colors that evoke negative associations and melancholy. Color expands the emotional gamut significantly.

Noos 7y ago

Eh, they'll die off. Tokypop used to try and license Korean manhwa here a while back ago, among other publishers. If you remember the movie the Priest, that was about as famous as it got here. I used to read it, usually it was the same problem a lot of Korean stuff has..it's an okay copy, but there isn't really an original spark to it that makes it come alive like manga does.

sercand 7y ago

I have paid to webtoons for fast-pass several times but not for manga from Japan. One of the reason is official translations come later than the fan translated versions. After a couple of days, there is no remaining discussion of the chapter at the community. Also, the community is ready to pay for the new manga chapters. Last month, a fan translation group removed their translation of a webtoon, which was in the fast-pass period, because of backlash by the community. I wish manga is more accessible. Because they are professionally crafted and have better storytelling.

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

Interesting to see the picture on the top of the article, meant to represent Japanese print manga, features Shingeki no Kyojin (Attack on Titan) most prominently. I don't think I've read any True Beauty, but then again, the fact that I'm not at all sure whether I have, whereas there is no chance of a snowball in hell that I'd confuse Shingeki No Kyojin for anything else, suggests to me that Japanese print manga still have a future. To say the least. And can I take this opportunity to point people to Totsukuni no Shoujo (The Girl from the Other Side)? https://myanimelist.net/manga/93972/Totsukuni_no_Shoujo https://myanimelist.net/manga/93972/Totsukuni_no_Shoujo Once in a while, I find a little gem like that buried under all the shonen and shoujo in my local bookstore. That's what keeps me coming back for more.

Quarrelsome 7y ago

worth noting One Punch Man started out in a web toonish delivery mechanism before being turned into manga.

ksec 7y ago

Warning: May be inappropriate comments ahead. I stumbled upon the topic many years ago when I was looking at online publishing and making money. And Webtoons in South Korea caught my eyes, It was in its early days but I first thought it was some idea that will be destined to fail. Simply because I don't believe there is a market that are willing to pay for it, the content were; Amateur at best. And it was too easy to private. I was wrong. I knew I was wrong because it is gaining momentum not only in Japan, but also across in SEA. There are two distinct category that Web Toons, and specially South Korea Webtoons excel in. LGBT and Adult Content. In LGBT I have no idea the audience were huge, with distribution channel like the web, even a small percentage would be a massive Number. And it was amazing to see lots of female secretly fantasise about Gay Man. And unlike man where many are privating porn, they are very much willing to pay for it. Then there is Hentai, ( the world actually means something else in Japanese but its English form is mostly used to describe Porn in Cartoons or 2D ). I mean, who enjoys it? And even if they did, who is wiling to paid for it? Again turns out the audience is actually gigantic. Pornhub even confirmed this when they release their data analysis. One day I chatted with an old friends, he is a real life translator who used to do subtitle for Anime as hobby and ask him what is he up to. Turns out he was doing these Webtoons translation from Korean and was making good money. Good not in terms of amount, but in terms of time spent vs money made. As it was much easier to do compared to Animation.

cirno9 7y ago
Commercial and independent gay and lesbian manga have existed for 40-50 years, and there's also a significant number of gay/lesbian anime and games.

syntaxing 7y ago

I'm a pretty huge reader of manga and I have been reading a couple of webtoons lately. Besides South Korean ones, there are couple of Chinese Webtoons that is based off of famous web novels that is really fun to read. South Korean webtoons tend to have "weird" formatting since its one long page rather like a book since its catered towards phones or tablets. I noticed a good amount of webtoons out of South Korea that is sponsored by Line originally but the industry has really taken off this past couple years with independent publishers. Not sure if this is true since I only see the English translated ones rather than the originals but I find that South Korean webtoons has a higher percentage of being explicit material. Not sure if it's because translators chose them on purpose since they have a higher click rate?